Windows Weekly 273: Honey Microsoft Don't Care

On vacation in France, I had the week off, but Leo and Mary Joe were joined by Peter "Dr. Pizza" Bright for the latest episode of the Windows Weekly podcast. They discussed Microsoft blocking booting to the desktop in Windows 8, the Windows 8 rollout schedule, BUILD 2.0, the Metro naming flap, Windows 8 virtualization changes, some new Surface tidbits, Do Not Track and IE 10, and Windows Essentials 2012.

Picks

Software pick of the week: MarkdownPad

Markdown is a simple markup language invented by (alas) John Gruber that's much faster and lighter-weight than HTML. It's supported (either directly or via plugins) in various blog platforms, it's also used in services such as GitHub. MarkdownPad is a nice little .NET/WPF-based editor with a split view, showing markdown on one side, and the formatted text on the other side, and it's a great tool for any blogger. And if your blog platform doesn't support Markdown, it has HTML exporting too.

Enterprise pick of the week: Windows Server Essentials 2012

Reminder: This is now in beta. It won't be out by Sept. 4 (as far as we know). This is the Windows Home Server replacement (according to MSFT)